House Passes Measure on Internet Domain Names

By JERI CLAUSING

Published: October 27, 1999

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26—
The House of Representatives passed legislation today to crack down on cybersquatting, the practice of buying up popular words as Internet addresses in the hopes of reselling them to companies and trademark holders at a hefty profit.

The bill was passed on a voice vote despite an effort by opponents to slow down action on the proposal. A similar version has already been passed in the Senate.

''This legislation will make cybersquatters think twice before trying to profit off the hard work of others,'' Representative J. C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma, the House Republican conference chairman, said of the bill by Representative James E. Rogan, a California Republican.

Civil libertarians, however, are concerned that the proposals, which now go to a House-Senate conference committee, will trample on free speech on the Internet.

In an E-mail campaign over the weekend, the Association for Computing Machinery, a group of computer professionals, circulated a message to get Internet users to urge members of Congress to vote against the bill, arguing that it would ''grant sweeping new powers for trademark holders and undermine the rights of domain name holders, Internet users and small businesses.''

The group also said the legislation would undermine a policy recently adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which was picked last year by the Clinton Administration to oversee administration of the Internet's addressing system.

That policy aims to reduce court battles over domains by establishing a uniform international arbitration system for resolving such disputes.

Both the House and Senate bills outlaw ''bad faith'' registrations of Internet addresses, or domain names, that use movie, book or product titles or the names of large companies that might later be interested in using those addresses to build an Internet presence.

Some companies have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get coveted Internet addresses away from those who had registered them. Other companies, however, have refused to pay what they consider to be the equivalent of a ransom, and have instead taken squatters to court.

In the House and Senate bills, bad faith is defined as using an Internet domain name that dilutes or is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark. The House bill gives courts the power to revoke a pirated domain name, and authorizes damages of up to $100,000 to be paid to a plaintiff. The Senate bill also establishes criminal penalties for repeat offenders.